Thread: More cat art

Originally Posted by elismom

That's a lovely drawing. My mother is an artist and she's always said the most difficult thing to capture is the eyes and Alexa did it masterfully.My mom attended the Rhode Island School of Design which I believe offers far more than just art instruction. I think their architecture program is one of some renown if that might be of interest to her given her creative bent...also it is is contiguous with Brown University and I believe they offer joint courses ...

My sister has an MFA from RISD. My father is an architect (Yale) and a photographer, my mother also has an architecture degree and is an artist. We know quite a bit about art and architecture as careers. The architecture field is one of the worst to go into right now. No jobs at all; many unemployed architects. By contrast, students graduate from even middling universities with computer science degrees (my field) and have little trouble landing $60k jobs.

Alexa applied to Brown in part because of the joint art program with RISD, but got waitlisted. For those in the US (and Canada I guess) that do not have children applying for college (and that have not done it in the last few years), the top US schools received record numbers of applications this year and so have record low acceptance rates. You can have perfect GPA, multiple AP classes/exams, high ACT/SAT scores, National Merit Finalist, etc., and still not get into many (or even any) top 25 schools if you are white or asian, middle class, attended a public high school, 2nd+ generation college, etc. As with many things here, I consider the college admissions system in the US to be seriously broken. Students have to apply to a raft of schools they don't really want to attend (paying fees for each application), admissions officers have to look at tens of thousands of applications for a thousand slots, etc. Stupid, wasteful, and causing thousands of the brightest kids in the US to question their value and why they bothered to work so hard in high school. One positive aspect of the system is that the top private schools are generally giving enough financial aid so that middle class kids can afford to attend them. (In fact this is one reason there are so many applicants.) Meanwhile, public universities have become so expensive due to state funding cutbacks that it is nearly as costly to attend them.